


and who lacks my organics

by mutterandmumble



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Developing Friendships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Introspection, Medical Inaccuracies, Mild Language, Missing Scene, Post MAG 132, Repetition, Spoilers, Warnings in Author’s Note, attempted anyways, canon-typical hurt, for the sake of aesthetic, implied daisy/basira, not much dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 14:06:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22497316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: By and large, the first few days out of the Buried are much as Jon expected.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 20
Kudos: 139





	and who lacks my organics

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for Buried-related trauma and canon-typical mentions of nightmares, spiders, and body horror, as well as some blood 
> 
> Title from Machine by Regina Spektor
> 
> I apologize a bit for the pacing and framing here- I really wanted to get to the character interactions and may have neglected everything else a little bit. That being said, I binged this show in like two weeks and on one hand it was really, really good, but on the other processing that much information in that little time got a bit confusing, so I apologize for any canon discrepancies in what is supposedly a canon-compliant fic. I also haven’t quite settled on characterization, but honestly I’m happy enough with the basis I’ve established and I’m kinda looking forward to getting to flesh my interpretation out a bit more

By and large, the first few days out of the Buried are much as Jon expected.

He wakes in the mornings and then promptly brushes his nightmares off like a spider from his shoulder, staunchly ignoring the way they smear messy arcs of viscera and fear over his palms. Then when he’s got his head on straight, and his skin’s painted shiny by the remnants of last night’s monster, he sets about extracting himself from the blankets. Those have taken to clinging to his limbs in long, heavy wisps, and untangling himself isn’t as easy these days, but he has experience and he can make do, so up and up he goes. Once freed he clambers around for a few seconds, hand slapping wildly at his nightstand for his glasses and instead knocking over a glass of water that he brought in last night that he really  _ did  _ intend to drink but never quite got around to.

Fine, that’s fine. The inside of his mouth tastes like dirt.

He manages the rest of his morning routine the same way he’s managed everything else in his life; through sheer dumb luck. The sort where you trip and fall and sprawl to your knees as your coffee spills all over your clothes and laptop, but when you look up there’s dropped bit of construction equipment lodged right where you would have been had you kept walking, so you decide that  _ yeah, maybe you can deal with a little bit of spilt coffee after all. _ That sort of conditional favor. But luck is luck no matter how dumb, and he’s not dumb enough yet to turn luck down, so Jon doesn’t question things one bit when he manages to board his bus in one piece.

He takes his usual seat, watching the people rushing along the sidewalks, hands wringing in his lap and head lolling from shoulder to shoulder as he stares blandly at the adverts pasted to the ceiling. The woman nexts to him falls asleep and her head droops down to his arm. He nudges her off, and she wakes for a moment to fix him with a glare before nodding right back off and accosting the poor person on her other side. Outside, a car whips through the early morning traffic, driven by the blind faith that everyone else will move for it and not deigning to care if they don’t. It’s followed by a chamber-choir of compact vehicles and irate drivers blaring sharp, staccato horns mixed into swears that get shot through their throats and to the high heavens.

It’s not  _ good,  _ and god knows that he could have lived ten lifetimes over without having to have learned what it feels like to have a rib or two ripped from his chest, but he’s in working order. His fingers hinge like they’re meant to. His eyes open and shut. If he tries real hard he can force a word or two around the lump that seems to have taken up an indefinite stay in his throat.

So it goes that a few days in (a few days _out_ ), Jon arrives at the Institute with phantom dirt inching its way along his skin. He expected that. A few days on and he’s alive (he’s alive) and he _didn’t_ expect that but there’s work to be done so Jon drags his (alive, alive) body through his usual slapstick routine of reading statements and playing at functionality, burrowing his way through piles of information he doesn’t quite grasp and gobbling down the weight that people have unintentionally lent their words, and he lives. He sits, back straight against his chair and time clicking on and on and on, and every now and then something in his brain trips and he’s slung straight to the heart of another half-assed bout of existentialism.

Today, when the third crisis of the hour rears its head, he decides that it may as well be accompanied by some tea and heads down to the breakroom to see if there’s any of the good stuff left. It’s quiet in the institute, and still; god only knows where everyone else is, and while he could  _ technically  _ find out if he wanted-

Nope. None of that. Not without his fucking  _ tea. _

So he holds the bad thoughts at bay for a moment, ignoring them with steadfast determination as he opens up the cupboard and pokes his hand through the- slowly shrinking- sea of mugs until he finds his own. Out it comes by the handle, hooked around his fingers, and he allows himself a moment of just  _ standing  _ there, in the quiet little half-kitchen with its sparse stockings and subpar coffee maker, the cool of the ceramic seeping into his skin as the clock on the wall ticks its way through another minute. There’s a fan whirring in the other room; the fridge is humming with its usual current of electricity. They’re good noises in their regularity, as easy to him as breathing ought to be had he not had blood curling up in the shape of two of his ribs. He’s never really  _ thought  _ about that, not really, never really let himself dwell on the implications or what exactly a thing like that might  _ mean _ , wonder about how many bits and pieces of himself he’ll have to portion out before he comes to an end.

Before- the world comes to an end? Before he does, again? Before someone he couldn’t bear to lose, either someone like a thorn in his side or a person infinitely more important than his own body, his own flesh and blood or lack thereof? Before the slow, subtle corrosion of his soul in the face of- himself? Not-himself? The ache in his brain that’s been sleeping down into his bones, that incessant, gnawing need for knowledge even while knowing-knowing- _ knowing  _ that it would swallow him whole, drag him head over heels into a riptide of swollen waves and vast seas of numbers and letters and words and pictures and symbols and meanings and and and  _ and- _

He’s chopped up his discomfort and divined its insides and then pieced it back together over and over until he twisted it into something uniquely terrible. He’s thought about it all too much, but he’s never really  _ thought _ about it, not in a real, raw way. 

And he’s not about to start now. That shit’s going  _ right  _ back into the box. Right with the thoughts of life and death and entities and monsters and whatever the fuck  _ else  _ there is running around.

With that he slams the door to the cupboard shut a little more heavily than can be justified and turns on his heel. He lifts his head up, roots around for those long-lost thoughts of tea and then just like that-

Just like that he’s no longer alone.

Sometime during his hazy pondering of life and lack of life and lack of lack of life, the door to the breakroom had opened and Daisy had leaned herself up against the doorframe, hands hung loosely at her sides. She’s still pale enough to show the veins in her wrist, her neck and her hands; Jon supposes that six months stuck in a fucking monster coffin will do that to a person. The shadows of her eyelids are so deep that they look soaked straight into her skin. They look at each other. The fan continues to whir and Daisy shifts, rail-thin legs hidden in the fabric of a nondescript pair of sweatpants and scars growing starker, streaks of roughly-healed pink applied in a bizzare facsimile of a blush.

And this is perfectly alright because they are both perfectly alright. It’s been a few days, and they’re alive. He smiles at her with his eyes and not his mouth and she smiles back with her mouth but not her eyes, the same shark-toothed, pointed roll of her lips over her teeth that she’s greeted everything from anger to annoyance to terror within the time that he’s known her. He wonders if it’s always been like that; if there are pictures of Daisy as a child, knees skinned and limbs flailing every which way and smile sharp, nearly bursting from her face in its anticipation of something to tear into.

Now it doesn’t quite suit her. Doesn’t match the way that she holds herself, skin too big for her bones and eyes wide in her head and hair shorn as close to the skull as it can get- she’s even wearing one of Basira’s casual wear shirts that she’d pulled out when they decided the dress code was irrelevant, and the soft length of its sleeves fall far past her fingertips, making her look even smaller in the harsh lighting. Her bottom lip is twisted up tight between her teeth, coaxing the red-pink into a sickly white. She does not have the strength anymore to throw conviction behind the points in her teeth or the whites of her eyes. She just looks tired. 

But Jon’s tired too. So he doesn’t quite smile at her, and she doesn’t quite smile back, and between the two of them they make one whole person. He turns again and reaches for the cupboard, grabs Daisy’s mug as she shuffles to the small table pushed up into the corner. It’s plastic, fold-up, and battered from years and years worth of archival assistants taking out their boredom on its slate-gray surface. She traces a blunted fingernail along a line that looks to have been made by a pencil and someone with far too much time on their hands as Jon gets some water onto the stovetop, and then there’s no noise other than the heat flushed around the stove and the sound of their breathing.

They’ve talked. Idle, cursory talks, the quick exchange of hellos and goodbyes and half-pleasantries, but they haven’t gotten to the heavy stuff yet. Jon thinks that between the two of them, they’ve got the heavy stuff covered for years to come.

But there’s no shame in getting a head start. So as he finishes up with the tea and portions it between the two mugs, he thinks. And then he thinks some more. Then he decides that  _ that’s  _ uncharacteristic, and the only way that this interaction is actually going to progress anywhere is if he acts as usual, bumbling blindly through a set of questions he doesn’t quite know how to ask and throwing caution to the wind. One of these days, if he gets lucky, it might catch in a particularly strong gust and come barreling back to slap some common sense into him.

Today is not that day.

“Daisy-“ he starts, and then stops, and then starts again because his self-preservation instincts were left behind somewhere in his early teens, “Daisy, have you been doing… alright?”

She looks at him. Her face is placid and her eyes flat and every inch of her, every hard-fought hard-worn stretch of skin and jutted out bone and knobbly, warped knuckle is  _ screaming  _ distaste.

“Situation permitting,” Jon corrects himself, as quickly as he can. He fumbles with the mugs. A few drops of still-hot tea shudder over one’s rim and splashes down onto his hand, and he doesn’t flinch. “I mean are you, um… alright? You know, as much as you  _ can _ be.”

Daisy stares at him for a minute more, sharpening until she looks nearly like her old self again before dropping her eyes and sagging back into her chair like a sack of bones. Jon can hear the clatter of her ribs against the warped plastic slats. She mulls his words over for a moment, rolling them up behind her eyes, and the air thickens around his head until it’s so heavy that it fights his every step as Jon moves to place one mug in front of her and then settle down into the only other chair. The sharp edge digs into his thighs as he shifts back and forth, wobbling from one leg to the other and listening to the slow  _ click-clack _ that his unease is mapping out against the tiled floor.

“I think I could be a hell of a lot more alright than  _ this, _ ” Daisy settles on a minute later, words gritted through her teeth until they come out all choppy. Start-stop, start-stop, with the hesitance that comes from disuse. Her accent curls hesitant around the vowels, and there’s an ear-splitting, gut-wrenching, heart-pounding  _ moment  _ where the weight of the matter slams into Jon and leaves him gasping for breath, treading the depths of their situation.

“Well,” Jon blinks. This is hard. What does he  _ say?  _ “Me too, I think.”

“No  _ shit _ .”

So not that.

“Ah.” Jon takes a sip of his tea. It’s too hot, and he doesn’t flinch.

“It’s just-“ she hisses, rolling out her shoulders. Her hands have wrapped tightly around her mug, fingers warping stick-thin through each other. “Just  _ fuck,  _ what do we do now?”

“Now?” Jon blinks again. Stupid eyes. What do they do  _ now?  _ “Well I’ve been reading through some-“

“Stop,” Daisy says. Her voice is wavery, thin like a piece of paper run beneath a faucet. She sets her shoulders farther back against the chair, shrinking herself down to a pinprick. Her eyes have gone as empty as her words, and the neckline of her shirt slips just so to reveal an inch of collarbone, bulging in a shadowy curve from her skin and looking sharp enough to cut. Fitting, Jon thinks. It looks like it’s fighting her. “Not that. I mean…” she waves a hand. The movement is halfhearted, aborted nearly as soon as it begins. When her hand drops again it falls so fast that Jon can hear the phantom  _ clang  _ of her knuckles against the floor.

“You mean in general,” he realizes a moment later, after some quiet and desperate extrapolation. There's a rush of pride in himself, at his stance- finally,  _ finally _ , he feels like he has a direction that he can coax things in. Finally, finally he feels like he’s found a foothold in this conversation.

Then he loses it and plunges three-hundred feet into the sea below because he doesn’t actually  _ know  _ what they should do now, not in  _ general _ . Usually he tries not to think about it. Usually. He tries, he tries.

“Yeah,” Daisy sighs. She’s begun to twist her sleeve around her arm, staring blankly at the steam pouring from her cup. One hard movement sends the leg of Jon’s chair crashing too hard into the floor, and he doesn’t flinch. “In general. What are we meant to  _ do _ now _ ,  _ Jon? I was stuck in there for  _ six fucking months.  _ You were in there for three days, and before that you were in a  _ coma  _ for  _ six fucking months.  _ Six  _ fucking _ months. What do we  _ do,  _ Jon? Where are we supposed to go from here?”

Jon doesn’t know, nor does he Know, nor does he Know how to know, not really. 

So what does he say?

“Up?” he offers dryly.

_ Not that, Jon _ , his brain chides. He tells it to come back when it feels like being useful.

But Daisy laughs a harsh little snort through her nose to the tune of the fan stuttering out in the other room. The twists in her sleeve have become tight enough to be a tourniquet.

So then they fall quiet again. Not in an uncomfortable way, because they’ve been through too much together for their silences to be uncomfortable, but it sits in the air like a weight hung from the moon. The table is small enough for their shins to press against each other, close enough that Jon can feel the sharp point of Daisy’s knee jabbing at his own. She’s cold- that must be the reason for the thicker fabrics she’s favored lately, he thinks, that and the trend towards shapeless, loose items that stems from the same sort of memories he has curdling through his brain.

He still doesn’t know what to say, so he just moves closer. Lets some of the warmth that he still carries spill on over into her and hopes that she holds it with more care than he does. She doesn’t comment on his shift in position but her lip is freed from between her teeth, and though it’s bitten bloody red and raw Jon takes that as a sign of encouragement. So as he goes to take another sip of his tea and Daisy mirrors him, fingers tapping up a one-man storm against the ceramic, he lets some of his weight lean into her and then he just… sits. Exists, in the picked-clean breakroom, alone and with Daisy. Feels the pounding of his heart in his chest and the ready-aim-fire of his neurons in his skull and marvels at the way his blinking falls into rhythm with the steady flow-and-ebb of the blood from Daisy’s lip.

A heater kicks in, sending rumbling waves of low-pitched sound thrumming through the room followed by a blast of damp air. Jon shudders; you’d think they’d have the funds to fix that sort of thing. He can’t see it as he’s not got eyes in the back of his head, but there is a spider steadily picking its way through a web in the corner far behind him, the one near the fridge. He’ll take care of that later. For now, he gnaws ceaselessly on the inside of his cheek and formulates a sense of himself, of Daisy and Daisy and  _ him,  _ and he does his best to settle on a course of action.

One, two, three. Talk, don’t talk, leave right here and right now and never look back but know with the eyes that he doesn’t have in the back of his head exactly how Daisy’s face twists as he walks away. One, two, three. The fluorescent lights flicker;  _ talk, don’t talk, leave _ , they chant at him. The spider in the corner does up the last knot in its web and then settles right in the center, legs protruding from the awkward swell of its body and flailing into a writhing mass of light-brown-dark-brown-flecked-black. It tells him to hurry up and make a decision because it’s getting hungry and the two of them scare off all the good flies.

I’m here,” Jon says lamely, eventually, because it feels the most appropriate and he doesn’t like the way that spider’s been eyeing him. “If you need me. I was in there too, you know.”

“I know,” Daisy tells him, unimpressed, and Jon cough-stumbles over his next words.

“Well  _ yes. _ But I mean…” he huffs out a breath. She offers a smile again, the same one from before, a vacant attempt at urging him onwards. “I mean I was  _ there.  _ I understand some. And I know I wasn’t in there for as long as you were, but maybe…” he trails off again.

“Maybe…“ Daisy echos.

“Well if you want, we can talk about it or something. We don’t  _ have  _ to, of course. I just thought it’d be nice.”

Daisy sizes him up like a prey animal. Her eyes stay their usual gold-brown, worn round at their edges, and seemingly subconsciously her tongue flicks out against her bottom lip. The blood streaks in its wake, not enough to stain but enough that her front tooth becomes speckled by a tiny fleck of red. Her face draws up in its severe angles, cheekbones already sharpened to a point made now to sit like razor-wire in the lighting and chin rounded out at the bottom, the same way that it has always been. Unquestionably, she is Daisy.

Unquestionably, she is not. She mulls him over in a way he’s never known her to, turns him this way and that in her mind and roughly wrenches any of the wriggly secrets that he may have left up and out from his stomach and into her hands. He watches her pass judgement, over and over again, receiving and rejecting his insides in turn before her face falls dead and she sighs deep through her mouth.

“Can we just sit? For a few minutes?” she asks, voice so  _ hollow  _ and  _ defeated  _ and  _ reminiscent _ of the horns and howls and torn-up screams that she no longer favors that Jon doesn’t flinch. Instead, he nods. He can do that.

“We can do that.”

And then they sit. In companionable silence for a few minutes, and then a few minutes more. The silence becomes no less companionable; the spider becomes steadily more irate, and the air takes on so much humidity that it seems fit to burst at the seams. In the absence of the fan and the opposing presence of the heater, the fridge sees it fit to start up some humming of its own- a high-pitched, electric squeal that splits open his head right along its seams. The microwave smells faintly of fish-  _ someone  _ has failed to subscribe to proper breakroom etiquette, and fine, that’s fine, that’s fine. This is fine.

The tenth minute of companionable silence is the first minute of crushing boredom. The tea in both of their mugs is nearly down to its dregs and the sounds of the fridge have given way to the quiet  _ woosh  _ of cool air through the vents; the lightbulb sorted itself out and now shines a steadfast, sickly yellow. The blood on Daisy’s lip has dried into a flaky crust of rust-brown, the spot on her tooth having worn off somewhere around minute seven. She’s stopped her symphony of taps too, just as Jon started up the rocking of his chair legs against the tile once more, so it’s into stark, empty air that the sound clatters. It’s awkward. It’s unnerving.

But it’s also kind of nice.

They’ve managed a whole half hour by the time someone comes bursting in through the door, jiggling the doorknob and creaking the hinges in such a way as to burst the bubble that they’ve made into two.  _ Pop  _ goes Jon’s shoulders as he starts (but does not flinch) and  _ pop  _ goes Daisy’s neck as she whips around coiled to strike like a snake and  _ pop pop pop  _ goes the fan in the other room that has decided that this is its time to depart from this life and crawl wheezing to the next. Basira comes crackling through the door with the rest of the world on her heels, eyes wide open and hands at the ready. Daisy relaxes at the sight of her- she eases back into her chair and melts again from her hazardous mass of sharp lines to a soft blur.

“There you are,” Basira says. “I’ve been looking for you.”

She comes all the way over and wraps a hand around Daisy’s shoulder with the sort of hesitance that’s been marking their interactions over these past few days; one borne of care, deep and pervasive, but so set in its ways that it has to stretch and squelch to accommodate the shift in their dynamic. It’s still a work in progress, apparently, because though Daisy seems to invite the touch both of them look a bit lost. Jon watches Basira’s face shift through a series of twists and turns, relief colored by uncertainty and uncertainty backed by a faint sense of discomfort, before she settles on calm indifference, takes a deep breath, and squeezes Daisy’s shoulder a bit. Her thumb runs a circle over her bicep. She does not give Jon more than a careless side glance.

“We have to go soon,” she tells Daisy. Her spine is stiff and straight, words careful and concise.

“Oh.” Daisy turns her head to the stove, looks at the green LED numbers ticking away through the hour, and tilts her head to her shoulder. “Time already?”

“I figured we could leave a bit early. Try and avoid traffic.”

“Excuse me,” Jon says against his better judgement. They look at him in near-perfect sync, Daisy a beat behind and Basira bearing down on him like the sea or sky. He has to resist the urge to draw his arms and legs up into himself, to tug the points of his elbows back to his sides and melt down to nothing. “ _ Where _ exactly are you going?”

“Doctor,” Basira says shortly. Then she coaxes Daisy up, still touching her like she doesn’t quite know  _ how  _ to anymore, and pushes the empty mug of tea across the table. Her foot is tapping away impatiently, louder than the fridge or vent or now-dead fan, and Daisy is staring at him with eyes that take up half of her face. “Take care of that, will you?”

He nods. Daisy keeps looking at him, blinking hard in time with the slow flick of her eyes, back and forth and back and forth from him to Basira and back. She stands a good half-head shorter than Basira, fine-boned like a bird, and smiles more real than she had earlier, letting it creep over her cheeks and up to the corners of her eyes. Jon’s surprised enough to smile back, wane as it is, at the understanding that somehow was passed along hand-to-hand in the time they’ve been together. He’s somewhat confused to find himself feeling  _ good  _ even, the angry wail of the voice in the back of his head placated by proof that he can still do good and be well received by somebody, quieted for a moment by his small, shared victory. And as they share in that victory Basira shifts impatiently, because she’s only been here for a minute and a minute’s not ten minutes or thirty minutes or three days or six months, and she’s not yet soaked in the calm that Jon thinks  _ must  _ be tangible by now.

“Good,” she says, sharp. “Now let’s go.”

And with that she begins to trundle Daisy towards the door. She meets no resistance, not even a half-glance by a head tottering on a neck bending like a twig, and they make it out. The door swings shut behind them a little too hard, and Jon doesn’t flinch.

What he  _ does _ do is sit  _ alone- _ alone for a moment, tries to see if it gives him the same sort of quiet that it did with Daisy, and finds very, very quickly that being  _ alone  _ alone (the spider, now bursting with indignation and clicking its mandibles in harsh, rattly taps doesn’t count) isn’t nearly as comforting as being alone with Daisy. He can already feel the edges of discomfort creeping back in, settling like water into the hollow at the back of his neck and making itself known by the way his more tranquil thoughts have begun to kick themselves up into a swirl of silt and fear and guilt, rocking him from the careful equilibrium he’d measured himself out into. And that’s fine, that’s fine, because it’s to be expected.

He gets up. He has to clean the mugs, and there’s work to be done.

So in the end, by and large, the first few days out of the Buried are much as he expected. If nothing else, though, at least he’s not always  _ alone  _ alone, and he thinks that he can work with that.

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you enjoyed!! Feedback is always really, really helpful!!


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